MEDIA-MUSIC VIDEOS Flashcards
Hegemony/Hegemonic Values
Cultural hegemony refers to domination or rule maintained through ideological or cultural means. It is usually achieved through social institutions, which allow those in power to strongly influence the values, norms, ideas, expectations, worldview, and behavior of the rest of society
technical codes
Codes are systems of signs, which create meaning. Codes can be divided into two categories – technical and symbolic. Technical codes are all the ways in which equipment is used to tell the story in a media text, for example the camera work in a film. Symbolic codes show what is beneath the surface of what we see.
Audio codes
They Audio use to lead the audience to feel a certain way
- sounds
- diegetic sounds
- non-diegeics sounds
Visual Codes
A camera shot is the amount of space that is seen in one shot or frame. Camera shots are used to demonstrate different aspects of a film’s setting, characters and themes. A CODE is a visual, audio or technical element that an audience has learned to imply meaning
Gesture codes
The term gesture also often signifies non-physical movements such as expressions in sounds or thoughts. The physical gesture could be a variety of different actions; it may be composed of a small wave of the hand, large movements incorporating the entire body or simply be a state of being, a posture or a stance.
Performance Based Music Video
Performance Based Music Video. Performance means where you perform an act i.e. concert, play or other form of entertainment. Performance based music video is a music video which presents the artist/band throughout the entire song; an example of this is ‘American Idiot’ by Green Day.
Performance videos mainly focuses on the artist or band just plainly
performing either on their own or in front of a crowd. There is no storyline,
just a collection of camera angles and movements of the band members. This
is popular amongst rock artists videos and are often seen in pop style music
videos. A good example of this is ‘Beyonce – Love on Top’ where the video
shows the artist continuously performing the song from a variety of camera
shots and angles.
Narrative Based Music video
A Narrative music video follows a story line. There are two types of
narrative: linear and fragmented. A linear narrative follows the
standard storyline structure: beginning, middle, end. ‘Katy Perry –
’Thinking of you’ A fragmented narrative is one that doesn’t BUT
depicts the lyrics from the song.
Concept Based Music Video
Concept Music Videos. 1. Concept Videos ‘A video that is based around a single idea or concept and are usually unusual or obscure. Features of a Concept Video - A concept video will include unusual images or narratives to maintain audience engagement
Lip Sync
move the lips silently in synchronization with a pre-recorded soundtrack.
Semiotics Theory
Roland Barthes
Semiotics simply means the study and interpretation of signs and symbols. It is the idea that texts communicate their meanings through a process of signification and codes – using the colour red and low key lighting for example uses signs or codes that an audience might associate with danger or fear. These signs within a text can function at the level of denotation, which is the ‘literal’ or common-sense meaning of the sign, and at the level of connotation, which involves the meanings associated with or suggested by the sign.
According to Barthes these constructed meanings can come to seem self evident, achieving the status of myth or normality through a process of naturalisation. Barthes’ interest in the structure of texts and how these structures communicate meaning also lead him to identify five “codes” that are present in the structures of the narratives of many texts and engage audiences. These are:
- The Enigma or Hermeneutic code – the way tension is built up in a narrative, engaging an audience by holding back information or leaving clues to create a sense of mystery and anticipation and leaving the audience wanting to know what happens next.
- The Semantic code – the way objects, characters and settings take on additional meanings. The audience are engaged by understanding elements in the text that have symbolic meaning and go beyond what is simply denoted.
- The Symbolic code – the larger symbolism in a text, particularly the way that many narratives are constructed around a conflict between binary opposites (see Levi Strauss below).
- Proairetic or Action code – these are signs that tell the audience that something is about to happen, they are shorthand ways of advancing the action. For example a cowboy putting his hand on his gun, looking straight ahead and chewing on a matchstick tells the audience he is going to kill the other man in a shootout without it being explicity stated.
- Cultural code – elements of a narrative that refer to the audience’s wider cultural knowledge. The audience need to have this knowledge to understand the reference.
In a nutshell: Barthes maintained that all elements of a media text are codes that need to be read and interpreted. These can all be understood as the thing they are (denotative level) and the responses they create (connotative level).
Structuralism
Claude Levi Strauss
Structuralism is an intellectual movement which began in France in the 1950s. Structuralists, such as Claude Levi Strauss and Roland Barthes, believe that cultural texts (books, paintings, and in our case media texts such as films, TV programmes, adverts etc) can best be understood by breaking them down and examining their underlying structures and codes. One of Levi Strauss’s key observations in examining the structure of cultural texts is that meaning is often created through the conflict between “binary oppositions”. In simple terms this means that the narratives of many cultural or media texts are constructed around two opposing forces: night vs day, good vs evil; clean vs dirty etc. Levis Strauss maintained that the way in which these binary oppositions are resolved (i.e. whether or not good triumphs over evil by the end of a film or book or whether or not the washing powder washes away the dirt in an advert) can have particular ideological significance.
Representation/Reception Theory
Stuart Hall
Cultural theorist Stuart Hall describes representation as the process by which meaning is produced and exchanged between members of a culture through the use of language, signs and images which stand for or represent things. Hall developed the idea that communication is a process involving encoding by producers and decoding by audiences. He stated that there are three hypothetical positions from which messages and meanings may be decoded: the preferred reading, the negotiated reading or the oppositional reading. The preferred reading is the producer’s intended message, the negotiated is when the audience understand the message but adapt it to suit their own values and the oppositional is where the audience disagrees with the preferred meaning. In a nutshell: producers want audiences to respond in a particular way to a text. Some audiences do (preferred readingsome audiences don’t (oppositional reading) and some are in the middle (negotiated reading).
Identity Theory
David Gaunletlett
David Gauntlett maintains that the media provide us with ‘tools’ or resources that we use to construct our identities. Whilst in the past the media tended to convey singular, straightforward messages about ideal types of male and female identities, the media today offer us a more diverse range of stars, icons and characters from whom we may pick and mix different ideas. In a nutshell: we use the Internet and other media texts to help us to create our own sense of identity and work out who we are. We now have more of a variety of representations to identify with than in the past.
Feminism Theory
Liesbet Van Zonen maintains that gender is constructed through discourse (through social expectation, the way it is spoken about, and how it is represented in the media and culture more widely) and that its meaning varies according to cultural and historical context. Along with many other feminist critics Van Zonen also puts forward the idea that the display of women’s bodies as objects to be looked at is a core element of western patriarchal culture. She also states that in mainstream culture the visual and narrative codes that are used to construct the male body as spectacle differ from those used to objectify the female.
Feminism Theory
Bell Hooks argues that feminism is a struggle to end sexist/patriarchal oppression and the ideology of domination. She puts forward the idea that feminism is a political commitment rather than a lifestyle choice (something that you have to be committed to and fight for rather than something you can just label yourself as). She also states that race and class as well as sex determine the extent to which individuals are exploited, discriminated against or oppressed. In a nutshell: according to Hooks feminism is a political struggle to end patriarchal domination and other factors affect this domination, including race and class.
